The Stone Angel

240 Pages·2011·29.94 MB·English

by  Canadian Literature

Sio.oo per copy
CANADIAN
Spring, iggi
SYSTEMS OF
STRUCTURES OF
A QUARTERLY OF CRITICISM AND R6V16W

DISCONTENT'S WINTER
LAST NOVEMBER — after Meech Lake had fizzled into recrimi-
nations, after Oka had dispersed in anger and disappointment, after "Free Trade"
was closing Canadian businesses down and throwing thousands out of work, after
90 per cent of the citizens of Vancouver voted to oppose the Goods and Services
Tax but $350 million was going to be spent by the federal government to institute
it anyway, after government funds dried up for social services and cultural expres-
sion but could be found to support militaristic posturing (in a GULF, no less: apt
word ), and after official committees had been struck to gaze at Canadians' collec-
tive constitutional desires — rains inundated the Coast and Lower Mainland of
British Columbia. Hundreds of people had their homes undermined, their livestock
drowned, their roads washed out (likely as a result of upstream clearcutting), their
ordinary expectations swept away by forces beyond planning and endurance. At
one point, a dam in Washington State gave way, and the once-pent-up waters
flooded north, directly through the Sumas border crossing, at one stroke closing
the customs office and erasing the visible differences between the trails of two
countries. It was hard not to read events at metaphor.
The September 14-20 issue of the Times Literary Supplement published
Margaret Atwood's prescient poem "The Loneliness of the Military Historian"
(it was reprinted, with different resonances, in the December issue of Harper's).
"Confess," the poem opens;
it's my profession
that alarms you .. .
and goes on :
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is in courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don't ask why because it is mostly the same.
EDITORIAL
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.
In my dreams there is glamour.
The Vikings leave their fields
each year for a few months of killing and plunder,
much as the boys go hunting.
In real life they were farmers.
They come back loaded with splendor.
But the poem makes clear that such splendour is illusory, however much one sympa-
thizes with the "boys" and the loneliness they dream of as duty or adventure. In
"real life," their dreams of romance are less real than the banality of people repeat-
ing misconceptions. "I deal in tactics," says the military historian, with Atwood's
muted eloquence; "Also statistics: / for every year of peace there have been four
hundred / years of war."
Statistics. In November, when the recording group Milli Vanilli had a Grammy
award taken away from them because they had lip-synched the hit that won
them recognition, a Roy Peterson cartoon in the Vancouver Sun depicted Cana-
dian leaders as a subspecies "Canadilli," with stars and stripes coming out of
their effectively silenced mouths. Where is the real irony here: in the disparity
between political dumbshows and cultural muteness, or in the ready applicability
of American pop culture iconography to Canadian social dilemmas? Or is this
choice too limited? Tactics.
It's not fashionable in criticism to talk about a Canadian Identity any more ; for
awhile I didn't even think it was necessary. But it's necessary all the more if people
are on the edge of losing their sense of the worthwhile values this country has at
various times stood for. If as a people we no longer have — or even think we have
— the capacity to choose what it is about our past that we want to leave behind
and what it is we want to hang on to, to shape our collective future, then we no
longer have our own voice at all. We're simply inundated by another's flood ; we're
dandled on the ventriloquist's knee ; we're opening our mouths only to let someone
else's opinions fill them with dust and rhetoric and straw.
The Canada I admire is the Canada that places community before irrational
unbridled individualism; the Canada that chooses peace and negotiated under-
standing over the peacock-strut of militarism ; the Canada that celebrates variety
and the possibilities of change rather than the uniformed neatness and emotional
smugness of a simple-minded nationalism ; the Canada that believes genuinely in
equality of opportunity and that attempts actively to avoid the isms of discrimina-
tion; the Canada that eschews violence; the Canada that refuses petty reprisals;
the Canada that values children and commits its resources to educating them for
the future ; the Canada that accommodates to social needs, that prefers universal
caring systems and preventive medicine to punitive action and the special privi-
EDITORIAL
leges of profit and class; the Canada that takes a quiet pride in the fact that it has
a culture and that doesn't see the need to shout its cultural distinctiveness or publicly
hold its heart every time a flag or a soapbox swings into view; the Canada that puts
people before political ego; the Canada that can tell the difference between com
mon currency and common sense. But does such a Canada exist, and did it ever?
I wonder. It's not the Canada we see around us now, riddled with envy, pettiness,
emptiness, and spite. But it's maybe still within reach — IF. ... IF as a community
we refuse the many current invitations to disintegrate politically; IF we recognize
that most separatist enthusiasms (of the east or the west) rely on the basest of
emotional appeals to racist superiority and cultural "unity" and serve more funda
mentally as ways of disguising arrogant aspirations for power; IF we admit openly
that we gain from each other most when we willingly refuse to reject each other,
when we compete without cruelty, when we dismiss the perennial appeals to re
establish cliques as our political masters, and when we accept the creativity of
difference and no longer define it as an alarming sign of uncertainty or impending
chaos. That's a lot of IF's. But it's also a lot of WHEN's. In other words, it tells of
real present opportunities, not of pie in the sky vagaries. And it tells of the need to
sort out our social priorities, reaffirm who we collectively are, and distinguish
between the opportunities we value (including the option of peaceably changing
governments, of whatever stripe ) and the illusions of crisis and management that
opportunist politicians market in the name of desire and the hope of control.
Another relevant cartoon appeared last November, by Brian Gable, in the Globe
and Mail of November 6th, just after one of several so called "Citizen's Forums"
was given the task of wallpapering a government's inadequate legislative imagina
tion. The cartoon portrays a limousine, flags flying, with a committee drawing up
to interview the citizens slumped in line in front of an employment (for which read
"unemployment") centre. The interviewer asks: "First question ... As a Cana
dian, is your greatest concern these days about ( A ) a flexible multifaceted consti
tutional amending formula? or (B) an operable veto provision enabling equitable
regional representation throughout the legislative process? . . ." Of the many ironies
this cartoon underlines, three stand out : ( ι ) the recognition that economic survival
matters more in most people's daily lives than does constitutional design, even when
constitutional giveaways and constitutional takeaways are the subject governments
are preoccupied with, the way weak office managers are preoccupied with the
arrangement of furniture; (2) the recognition that a bureaucracy that is caught
up in its own jargon cannot see the disparity between the language it uses in the
name of clarity and the language that individual people in real economic and
political relationships must use in order to be clear; and (3) the recognition that
bureaucratic language has the power to be effective even if it isn't clear or doesn't
adequately measure people's lives : that it has power both because it is the language
of government and because disenfranchised, disempowered, dislocated, slumped
EDITORIAL
people are vulnerable. Such people are susceptible therefore to the gobbledygook
of "efficiency," "order," "economic understanding," and "command," even when
such language is empty of value and when it actively subverts the values for which
the community has long stood. Recognizing the irony does not, of course, resolve
the cultural disparities that cartooning exposes; indeed, such recognitions more
often seem like invitations to despair. Despair, however, just works to entrench the
power of those who would usurp community values. It isolates; it intensifies divi-
siveness; it encourages passivity; it must be opposed.
But how to oppose it? November seemed like a dispiriting month only until
December dawned, with paper blizzards from all the bureaucracies, gale-force
winds, power outages, and real ice and real snow in the once temperate outdoors.
The ineffectuality of the Vancouver voters' gesture — and of the active opposition
of the great majority of Canadians — was made manifest when the Goods and
Services Tax was manipulated into law. In practice inflationary, this tax will also
be discriminatory, not least because Members of Parliament exempted their own
office supplies from it. But the rhetoric that brought it into existence reveals another
misapprehension as well: in the name of business efficiency (distorting the phrases
"good management" and "fair practice"), the law relies on a misleading and sim-
plistic binary distinction in order to transfer national economic authority from
"public" to "private" hands. In fact at least two additional variables function in
this unquiet equation : the "state," whose bureaucratic commitment to structural
power does not always serve the "public" to whom it should belong and with whom
it is often misleadingly identified, and the "corporate," which must be distinguished
from both public and private conceptions of organization. "Corporate" manage-
ment seeks characteristically to use authority in its own favour, arguing in the
process that public values — ecological management and social care, for example
— can be set aside as unaffordable. The state, comparably, serves itself, and the
"private" and the "public" are alike sacrificed to expediency.
Transparently, the GST law will benefit the well-to-do and punish those with
limited expendable incomes; in other words, it will punish young people, small
householders, small business people, women, children. In these post-Meech months,
punishment seems the discourse of the day, apparent in the flood of petulant politi-
cal jibes uttered against Newfoundland, Manitoba, Natives, and anyone else —
70% of Canadians: that's what polls have indicated — who refused the politics of
Meech Lake, recognizing that (for all the attractiveness of the "unity" package in
which it was marketed) this particular arrangement of hierarchies of power would
in practice have re-established the Family Compact and the Château Clique as
pre-emptive rulers of Canada. Why has there been so fierce a reaction to those who
recognized its flaws? Angry attack, among other things, is an easy way to try to
cover up a mistake: wars are declared for such reasons. The grim rhetoric of
"crisis" thrives on anger and intensifies simplistic distinctions between us and them,
EDITORIAL
right and wrong. Clearly, there are gulfs in this country. But they will take more
than a state (task) force to bridge. They will take trust, and tact more than ritual
recrimination. Trust and tact, however, depend upon communication, and that's
not always easy, particularly when, as history makes clear, the avenues of public
and private communication — the avenues of resistance to crisis rhetoric, perhaps
— can (like companies, like countries) be closed down.
Toronto's Saturday Night reached several times beyond Toronto during 1990 in
order to warn that Canada's communications systems were in danger; in the
September issue, Bronwyn Drainie oracularly warned: "if Canada disappears, so
does the . And vice versa." The publicly owned Canadian Broadcasting Cor
poration is a unifying force within a potentially centrifugal country [unifying, not
uniform alizing). Because it is not immune to crisis rhetoric, nor free from bias,
and because (as fall and winter progressed) no changes of any consequence could
be perceived on the nightly τν screen, it even seemed as though the warnings of
danger could be dismissed as overdramatizations. But then December struck. In
December the government bureaucracy sliced $108 million from the CBC'S budget,
and summarily cut scores of jobs — at a time when citizens were collectively being
told that there was "no limit" to the amount of money that could be spent on
military exercises. More striking even than the sums and the ironic contrast in
political priorities that is represented by the difference between one form of ex
penditure and the other was the nature of the cutting. For what was cut was "local
production." This term is by no means as innocent as it looks — it describes an
activity, not a quality, and using it to dismiss something for qualitative reasons
(however vaguely) betrays the narrow conception of nation and culture that
underscores all the political tensions of the nascent 1990s. It reveals that the "garri
son mentality" is fundamentally a business model of social relationships: authori
tarian in its defence of the corporate pyramid, willing to sacrifice whatever or
whoever is deemed peripheral, without power, unlikely to stir resistance and "there
fore" inconsequential. It is the Compact Clique view of society, reinforcing the
mutual exclusiveness of two (language separate) "national" pyramids, and dis
allowing not just alternative perspectives but also the exchange of perspectives,
perhaps because exchange might encourage some questioning of received versions
of political reality.
The 108 million dollars' worth of cuts unilaterally cancelled all television pro
duction in western Newfoundland, cut English language production facilities in
Quebec, cut smaller city productions in other parts of the country. The argument
in favour of cuts involved expense ; but even those programmes that were making
consistent profits for the corporation were cut, which raises further questions about
the rhetoric of reorganization. Cutting productions because they were "local" •—
not even "regional," to use the pyramid rhetoric — tacitly declared four things:
( 1 ) that "local" audiences need not be served by the public broadcasting system,
EDITORIAL
(2) that "local" programming would be of no interest across the nation, (3) that
Toronto and Montreal were neither local nor regional but "central" (why aren't
Winnipeg and Moncton also considered "centres" of anglophone and francophone
expression?), and (4) that whatever programming emerges from Toronto and
Montreal must therefore be "national" — and therefore of national interest and
consequence. (Why? Because of its source? Or because of the particular filters
that these "centres" locally employ?)
None of these "reasons" addresses the real problem of "national" communica
tion : exchanging perspectives. When it's not readily possible in Quebec City to
know what Winnipeggers and Vancouverites and Haligonians variously think
about life, the nation, and the world — and not readily possible in Vancouver and
Windsor to know what the others think, and so on, and so on — but only possible
to know what the "central" filters permit people to know and how they permit
them to know it, then we do not have an exchange, we have a corporate tyranny.
We have a society more committed to pantomine than to speech, more committed
to the theatre of "national crisis" and the image of "regional curiosity" than to
community understanding. It is a frame of mind that permits "local" to mean
"irrelevant," "local productivity" to sound like an oxymoron, and cuts in "local
production" to be marketed as wise management. But it is precisely this frame of
mind that encourages separation. Whether people openly attack others (in the
name of virtue or with a claim upon superiority) or celebrate their own "martyr
dom" in order to construct a politically workable version of "enemy," they diminish
the value of exchange ; and diminishing the value of exchange — even in the name
of efficiency or unity — feeds the distrust of others, encourages petty authoritarian
ism, and so, fundamentally, fosters cultural disintegration.
The December news not just that the was curtailed nationally but that $3
million of federal money was to be spent on a missile testing site in Esquimalt and
that an additional $269 million of federal money was to be spent expanding Space
Programme facilities in a Montreal suburb simply encourages cynicism. A pur
chased fidelity is a shallow commitment. While cutting back on regional voices
will not do away with separatism, moreover, neither will the granting of absolute
authority to every articulate "region" guarantee "national unity." It is necessary,
instead, to allow regional access to the whole communications network, to let voices
from all parts of the country speak to and be heard by the national community. Of
these activities, the hearing is the most difficult to bring about : it depends upon a
willingness to listen and the will to understand the validity of differences. And that,
in part, means giving the public more credit for intelligence, for being able to
appreciate the diversity, the integrity, and the value of their society, and more
power, plainly, than the rule makers who serve only bureaucratic statism.
The Australian writer Les Murray, in "The Quality of Sprawl," a poem dedi
cated to the Australian resistance to Cultural Authorities and Society Style, speaks
8